In our school environment, we had a couple issues with Google Earth's default behaviors - here are my workarounds.
First off we have a student web proxy that works based on a whitelist concept. So we have to allow any web traffic explicitly. With the help of little snitch and ...
There are times I need to create some easy to remember weak initial passwords for students - here is a quick script
Note that these are not strong passwords as they are the definition of "dictionary" passwords...
import sys
import os
import random
dfile = '/usr/share/dict/web2'
def main():
for ...Even though we moved our email from OS X server to google apps for education - we still manage our lists with a local mailman instance (still on 10.4). However the web based interface for adding new members can be a bit of a pain as it never seems to ...
Sometimes you get in a situation where you are editing a long command on the command line and you'd kill to be able to use your mouse to select a word or option in the middle. This tip makes it a pleasure
First for me their was the discovery ...
iLife and iWork can throw up an awful lot of update dialogs and welcome screens for people who first launch them. For users on my network I wanted to prevent those from coming up
There are a number of defaults that can be set to make these not appear. The ...
Tools are getting so sophisticated now - that they can be a distraction for the lightweight or part time coder.
You can get lost in the ins and outs of git vs hg, choosing a database engine (SQL vs Key-Value etc), javascript frameworks, PIP vs Buildout and integrating with virtualenv.
They ...
In my quest to automate the workflow of managing Macs at work, I wanted a way to download disk image files from apple ahead of time - once downloaded the next will be to integrate with my watched install project from the previous post, and then auto lcreate the loadsets. I ...
[update: project now on bitbucket]
**The Problem**
There is often the need in a deployment scenario to repackage an installer into some other format. This might be a [radmind][1] transcript, a simple payload only installer package or perhaps just a manifest of what exactly changed on the system.
Apple ...
This is one of the most frequent utility routines I have in many (most?) of my python scripts. Creating subprocesses in python is very flexble and powerful, but a bit verbose. Sometimes you just want to run a command and set a variable to the output.
from subprocess import Popen ...
Sometimes doing tedious layout work in Illustrator is both time consuming and hard on the wrists. In this post I show a quick example of how one can script Illustrator very effectively
I work at a school where I'm involved in putting together our yearbook. For several years now ...
Despite vowing to stay away from Applescript as far as I can - sometimes its the fastest way to save a little time
At work I'm involved in laying out our yearbook. Honestly a lot of these pages are just quick photo montages. I've made these in both Illustrator ...
The iTunes 8.2 update came out today with some curious details that, when you squint hard enough, suggest that Apple is trying to lock out the Palm Pre even before it launches.
John Gruber recently [discussed](http://daringfireball.net/2009/06/webos_itunes_integration) the likely coming battle around Palm's ...
One of the things Leopard changed from Tiger was who could add printers. In Leopard only admins could manage printers - a change made apparently because schools were complaining that non-admins were adding printers they weren't supposed to. But then it turned out that there were just as many cases ...
This is probably only of interest to those of you that have to deploy iPhoto over a slower (ie wireless) network.
_updated with corrections from comments_
The main application package for iPhoto 8 is over 300mb - of that 100+ is a Points of interest database, that contains information in many ...
Ever since I had a Powerbook Duo back in the day - I've made a laptop my primary machine. There has never been a sync solution that I have found adequate - and with my current AL macbook - I'm happy with the performance and memory. The only shortcomming is the ...
Managing a large number of Macs at an institution often requires a hodgepodge of tricks and tools. While Apple packages some useful stuff os OS X server, many of the most useful things are hidden, created by the community, or rely on OS X's UNIX underpinnings. One of the ...
Deny hosts is a clever python script that will monitor your ssh log file for repeated failed login attempts, and then add the offending hosts to a system blacklist. While you can disable ssh entirely, or move it to a different port, there are reason you may want to keep ...
__9/2/2009 Updated to work with now longer Twitter ID numbers__
back when Jott was free I was one of several people who were using it to get quick voice notes into [OmniFocus](http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/) (OF). A couple of limitations of the Jott solution was ...
There are a has been a number of version control systems en vogue over time, CVS, SVN, Git etc.
I try to keep up with them, use them where possible, but don't put EVERYTHING I do in version control. Since I am on a Mac running Leopard, I do ...
After reading this [excellent tutorial on using screen](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-gnu_screen/index.html), I've started to use it more especially when on remote ssh connections. I wanted a way to invoke it automatically whenever I logged in, but only for remote sessions (locally I ...
While my primary Twitter usage is on my iPhone - I sometimes get behind and would like to not have to catch up with 100 tweets at the end of the day. I've had [Growl](http://growl.info/) installed on my machine for a while now and figured it would ...
I'm trying to squeeze the process of learning Django into my busy life, but keep getting distracted by little projects around making the learning easier, rather than actually messing with Django proper (That should change soon). Anyway, while the official [Django docs](http://docs.djangoproject.com/) are readable on ...
### Background ###
As a busy father there are times during the day when I can not be glued to the computer, but am free to listen to something on headphones (ie doing dishes, cleaning the garage etc). Sometimes I listen to podcasts - but sometimes I'm out of interesting ones. I ...
I had recently done some work on one machine and wanted to install it on a second.
The work relied on a number of libraries that I had downloaded and compiled from source and at first I was thinking I would end up redoing that on the other machine.
Well ...
Here are icons from three apps I use fairly regularly - seems like purple is the cool color right now. Time for iTunes to change its color again.
